London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

Fill in the gaps. But first find them

I’ve just come across an interesting and well-written article on the KOFIC website which gives a very good review of the state of the Korean film industry in 2005. Here’s a link. The challenge with the article is that, at least on my browser, all the names of the films have been omitted. Sometimes, unless you read the sentence really carefully, it’s possible not to notice that something’s wrong. The first lacuna is obvious, on the second line (the missing word is Marathon, which is easy because they give you the answer a few lines further on.) The second lacuna is at the beginning of the second paragraph, and the answer is Welcome to Dongmakgol. When the article starts talking about You Are My Sunshine in the third paragraph, the text reads “Although directed by Park Jin-pyo has been classified as a melodrama…”. It might be a fun exercise in textual analysis and Korean film trivia to try to reconstruct the article as it must have been before the gremlins got at it. But while the article is very thought-provoking, you’ll only get the best out of the version currently on the KOFIC website if you are a walking encyclopedia of Korean film. If anyone feels like doing that reconstruction job, I’d be interesting in seeing the results.

Update 31 July 2019: The glitch in the KOFIC website is cause by the infuriating and all-too-common practice among Koreans of using less than (<) and greater than (>) signs instead of quotation marks or inverted commas when indicating titles of things such as movies. When a web browser sees a “lesser than” sign (<) it thinks it is the start of some html markup, and when it then finds a movie title that bears no relation to valid html it doesn’t know what to do, so it ignores everything until the closing “greater than” sign.

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